Skip to main content

Author: knutson4

The History Of Food Safety With Deborah Blum

Posted on
WORT FM

Deborah Blum is a science writer and the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Prior to that, she was a professor of journalism at UW–Madison from 1997 to 2015. She is the author of many books, including The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin, 2010) and The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2018).

The Quiet Endurance of Marcy Kaptur

Posted on
Washington Post

Kaptur was born in Toledo in 1946, the granddaughter of Polish immigrants. Her father ran the family grocery store and her mother worked for auto-parts maker Champion Spark Plug, a company that helped build Toledo but dissolved its last operations there in 2010. The first person in her family to go to college, Kaptur graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1968 and returned to Toledo to work in city planning.

Colleges Would Rather Freshmen Not Choose Their Roommates

Posted on
Atlantic Monthly

In 1926, the University of Wisconsin published a brochure advertising its new men’s dormitories. “Here … the man from the well-to-do home and the man who tends furnaces to buy his text-books will learn respect for each other across a common table,” the booklet read, “and the son of banker and farmer will find mutual understanding, of a winter’s evening, in give and take to the crackling of logs in a wide fireplace.”

The Existential Consequences of Lab Errors

Posted on
Slate

Noted: In 2010 and 2011, the labs of Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands separately announced that they had succeeded in making the deadly H5N1 avian flu virus more transmissible through genetic engineering. Since it first spilled over from poultry to human beings in Hong Kong in 1997, H5N1 has infected and killed hundreds of people in sporadic outbreaks, mostly in Asia. The virus has a roughly 60 percent fatality rate among confirmed cases, but fortunately, H5N1 almost never spreads from person to person. Nearly every infection is due to close contact with infected poultry.

The Gift-Card Budget Strapped for cash, state governments are plugging holes using unspent gift cards. Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.

Posted on
Atlantic Monthly

Brenda Mayrack never intended to become an unclaimed-property czar. Even among legal specialties, the field is particularly obscure: During law school at the University of Wisconsin, she remembers hearing only a 10-minute lecture introducing the topic at the end of her trusts-and-estates class. But as the director of Delaware’s unclaimed-property office, Mayrack now oversees a fund of $540 million a year, forgotten by people from Paris to San Francisco and then held temporarily by the state.

Five ways parents can help their kids transition smoothly to middle school

Posted on
Washington Post

Quoted: If a new sixth-grader has no one to sit with in the lunchroom one day or bombs a test, “they may start to question whether they fit in socially or can succeed academically,” notes Geoffrey Borman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Borman and Rozek conducted research to see whether it was possible to bolster kids’ sense of belonging by underscoring that all students have difficulty at the start of middle school but eventually feel better.

Want to live longer? Be an optimist, study says

Posted on
CNN.com

Quoted: “Optimism is one important psychological dimension that has emerged as showing some really interesting associations with health,” said neuroscientist Richard Davidson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds.

“And I would add other positive attributes, such as mindfulness, compassion, kindness, and having a strong sense of purpose in life,” Davidson added.

GOP Congressman Sean Duffy To Resign From Office

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the district tends to favor Republicans.

“It really is a combination of the drawing of the district lines in a way that was intentional to favor Duffy and Republicans who were in charge of that process, but also just really migration of that district in the Republican direction,” he said.

Biased Evaluation Committees Promote Fewer Women

Posted on
The Scientist

Noted: Régner suggests that a “habit-breaking intervention,” such as that described by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Patricia Devine and colleagues, might help to facilitate gender equity at academic institutions. In these sessions, participants are made aware of their implicit biases and learn strategies to counter them. This year, the CNRS began offering training sessions on gender stereotypes to evaluation committee members and each committee has appointed a reference person in charge of gender equality issues. Raymond tells The Scientist this self-evaluation and corrective action should take place at all academic institutions, but may be a long time coming.

Psychologist: Back-To-School Jitters Are Common. But Talk To Your Kids About Them

Posted on
Wisconsin Public Radio

New pencils, notebooks and backpacks may be on the checklist as the summer winds down and kids gear up for a new school year, but Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says it’s also an important time of year to check in with kids on how they’re feeling about heading back to school.

“We spend a lot of time preparing our kids for school by buying them school supplies or back-to-school clothes, but our families should equally spend time preparing kids mentally for the start of the school year and pre-school jitters and anxiety,” said Mirgain, a clinical psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.

As Amazon Wildfires Blaze, Deforestation May Be to Blame

Posted on
The Great Courses Daily

Quoted: “Deforestation was a well-known problem in the classical world,” said Dr. Paul Robbins, Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “For example, the historian Strabo wrote in the 1st century B.C.E. that the lowland areas of the island of Cyprus were once covered with forests that prevented cultivation, but these had all given way to farming and other activities.”

How Climate Change Will Kill Your Internet

Posted on
Vice

Noted: A study published by researchers at the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at fiber optic cables in low-lying regions, and how they’d hold up as sea levels start to rise. Based on the prediction that ocean levels would rise by a foot in the next 15 years, they said at least 6,400 km of fiber optic cable in just the US would be permanently submerged, affecting network connections from New York to New Mexico. Which means your precious Instagram scrolling hours could very well have a deadline.

One year after major flooding, Coon Valley grapples with what comes next

Posted on
La Crosse Tribune

Quoted: Throughout the country, 10-year storms, which have a 1 in 10 chance of happening in any given year, are occurring about 40% more often than in the 1950s, said Daniel Wright, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the eastern half of the U.S., 100-year storms are happening 85% more often.

It’s very clear that climate change is increasing the number of storms we’re seeing, Wright said. “If we continue to ignore these problems, the cost of ignoring these problems is going to increase as the planet continues to warm.”

AIQ Solutions of Madison raises $3.2 million for cancer treatment assessment software

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

A Madison company that makes software approved to gauge treatment response in breast and prostate cancer patients plans to submit a second product, for blood cancers, for approval by early next year.

AIQ Solutions, which is based on technology developed at UW Carbone Cancer Center, raised $3.2 million in equity financing, the company announced this month. Capital Midwest Fund led the round, which also involved Rock River Capital Partners, 30Ventures and Wisconsin Investment Partners.

UW safety Collin Wilder, 11-year-old Aubrey Wayman become teammates off the field

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

The meeting was intended to be brief — a hello, a handshake, a group photo, some words of encouragement — but Collin Wilder lingered after others had left.

There was something about Aubrey Wayman that made Wilder, in the early stages of his first season with the University of Wisconsin football program after transferring from Houston, want to stick around a little longer.

Just Ask Us: Why don’t undocumented immigrants who marry citizens automatically become citizens?

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

It’s a common misconception that immigrants to the United States automatically gain citizenship status when they marry a U.S. citizen, said Erin Barbato, director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW Law School. Barbato said the process to citizenship even after marriage is time-consuming, expensive and complicated.

“The process of obtaining (lawful permanent residence) is often expensive, costing thousands of dollars in government and attorney fees, is stressful on the entire family, and is a demanding process for many couples who are still in the first stages of their marriage, all while they are simply attempting to build their lives in the U.S.,” Barbato said.

Edgewood High School sues Madison over athletic field conflict, alleges religious discrimination

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Noted: Madison’s public high schools do not have master plans, while UW-Madison does. In its federal complaint, Edgewood lists 11 facilities that it says UW-Madison uses for activities not specified in its master plan.

The facilities listed include the Near West Fields, the Near East Fields, the Natatorium and the Goodman Softball Complex, which the complaint maintains are all used for competitions without that use being specified in UW’s master plan.

History preserved, along with Walter Kohler’s bathtubs, in Madison’s Mansion Hill District

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Noted: In more recent years, the house, at 130 E. Gilman St. in Madison’s Mansion Hill District, was home to UW-Madison students in the Knapp Memorial Graduate program.

The house — where guest rooms are named after Bull, Kohler, La Follette, Thorp and others connected to the property over the years — was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and a year later was designated as a city landmark. It was placed on the State Register of Historic Places in 1989. Students left the Knapp House in 2012 and since then the house, just up the hill from the UW Lifesaving Station, had been empty.

The parents of late Wisconsin astronaut Laurel Clark were killed in a car crash in Arizona

Posted on

Noted: Clark was one of seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. She died when the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry just 16 minutes before it was due to land in Florida on Feb. 1, 2003. Clark was 41.

Clark grew up in Racine, graduating from Horlick High School in 1979 before heading to Madison, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1983 at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in medicine in 1987.

Trump’s offer to buy Greenland

Posted on
BBC

President Donald Trump’s offer to purchase Greenland from Denmark earlier this week bewildered many, Assistant professor of Scandinavian studies Claus E. Andersen spoke to BBC radio about the impact on relations between the U.S and Denmark. Cue to the 17 minute mark to hear his thoughts.

Photos: Remembering the UW-Madison Sterling Hall bombing 49 years ago

Posted on
Wisconsin State Journal

Early in the morning of Aug. 24, 1970, four anti-Vietnam War radicals — Karleton Armstrong, his brother Dwight Armstrong, David Fine and Leo Burt — used a van filled with almost a ton of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to bomb UW-Madison’s Sterling Hall, killing researcher Robert Fassnacht and injuring three others.

Bad Roommates: Study Tracks Mice to Nests, Finds Ticks Aplenty

Posted on
Entomology Today

Noted: Susan Paskewitz, Ph.D., professor and chair of the of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior author on the study, says checking out mouse nests was a logical choice. “We were developing an agent-based model that explored mouse behavior and blacklegged tick numbers on the mice,” says Paskewitz, who conducted the research alongside Wisconsin graduate students Ryan Larson and Tela Zembsch and research associates Xia Lee, Ph.D., and Gebbiena Bron, Ph.D. “The model suggested that mice spend so much time in nests during the day that ticks should be detaching and ending up in that environment at greater rates than we had suspected. So, we decided to look in nests, which turned out to be more difficult than you might imagine.”

SciFri Book Club: One For The Birds

Posted on
Science Friday

Noted: We close out the summer’s birdy nerdery with a celebration of some of these bird geniuses, and learn how researchers are investigating their minds through experimentation and observation. UCLA pigeon researcher Aaron Blaisdell and University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Lauren Riters join Ira and producer Christie Taylor to talk about the brightest minds of the bird world, and the burning questions remaining about avian brains.

Larval Bees are Omnivores, Shows New Study

Posted on
Sci-News

Quoted: “Bees actually require the non-plant proteins of these pollen-borne symbionts to complete their growth and development — which makes them omnivores,” said Dr. Shawn Steffan, a research entomologist with the Vegetable Crops Research Unit of the Agricultural Research Service in Madison, Wisconsin and the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In the study, the Dr. Steffan and his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell University and Hokkaido University used isotope- and gas chromatography-based methods to calculate the ratio of nitrogen in two types of amino acids (glutamic acid and phenylalanine) in the tissues of adult bees and in beebread.

Surprise: Bees Need Meat; Microbes in flowers are crucial to bee diets, and microbiome changes could be starving the insects

Posted on
Scientific American

Noted: Prarthana Dharampal of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Shawn Steffan, who works jointly at the university and the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), assessed 14 different bee species in six of the seven bee families. They found that bees eat substantial amounts of microbes, enough to change how they fit within food webs. Scientists use a scale to categorize where organisms belong in that web: those that make their own food, such as plants, register at so-called trophic position 1 (TP 1), herbivores register at TP 2 and carnivores do so at TP 3, or even higher if they eat other carnivores.

Number Of Mosquitoes Is ‘Average’ In Wisconsin So Far This Year, Professor Says

Posted on
WPR

It’s been a wet summer in Wisconsin and wet summers are often filled with mosquitoes. But that isn’t how 2019 has played out so far, according to a Wisconsin scientist.

Lyric Bartholomay, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who studies infectious disease agents such as mosquitoes and ticks, told WPR’s “The Morning Show” Thursday that the state has seen average numbers of mosquitoes so far this year.

Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

Posted on
Harvard Business Review

Noted: Research that one of us, Bill, did with Willie Choi of the University of Wisconsin and Gary Hecht of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, suggests that simply talking about strategy with people is not sufficient. In other words you can’t just invite them to boardroom briefings and hang signs around the building promoting the strategy—you need to involve people in its development.

‘A huge story to be told’ Preservation project helps Stark Co. resident trace family roots

Posted on
The Dickinson Press

A Stark County resident is tracing his German-Hungarian family’s roots through a project called Preservation on the Prairie. The project, which was sponsored by the Stark County Historical Society via grant from Humanities North Dakota, is headed by Anna Andrzejewski, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She, along with graduate students Travis Olson, Laura Grotjan and Carly Griffith, are working to preserve the history of Stark County’s German-Russian and German-Hungarian families.

“We get out a tape measure and we create floor plans of the buildings as well as sometimes drawings of the exterior of the buildings,” said Andrzejewski. “We’re using the buildings kind of to learn about the people, but we can’t do it just with measured drawings like this. We have to learn from maps, other kinds of records, atlases — talking to people is the best resource that we’ve found. You guys know when your properties were homesteaded. You have information that has been passed down to you about the history of these buildings, and that helps us fill the gaps.”

Know the Facts Bed Post: How to safely navigate the first weekend on campus

Posted on
The Post

Noted: Staying safe is much more important than getting caught doing drugs or drinking, so rather than fearing potential consequences of drinking underage or doing drugs, focus on calling for help if it means helping someone else or saving a life. Some police departments and colleges, like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, even have a system where if someone is underage drinking, but call to report a crime, they will be safe from any consequences because they were responsible by reporting.

How a small Japanese rubber company became the lifeblood of the tech industry

Posted on
The National

Noted: JSR’s decision to get into that market was bold but Mr Koshiba seemed like the right person for the job. He’d spent two years studying materials science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a Rotary Club scholarship, was one of the few English speakers at the company and was eager to work abroad. In 1990, JSR sent him to Belgium to set up a photo-resist joint venture with the country’s biopharmaceutical giant UCB. The goal was to target the American market.

More than 1 million people use this app each month to be rewarded for brand loyalty

Posted on
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Wes Schroll didn’t care where he bought groceries. As a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Schroll shopped where it was convenient depending on if he was walking, taking the bus or driving to the store.

He signed up for loyalty rewards programs at various stores. But looking in his pantry, he bought the same brands each week. Schroll wanted to be rewarded for that loyalty. The frustration led him to develop Fetch Rewards, an app that has shoppers scan in receipts to get points for the brand-name products purchased.

In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

Posted on
New York Times

Noted: When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it.

Written by Matthew Desmond, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and a UW alumnus.

Meet the Author: Transplant surgeon Joshua Mezrich on new book How Death Becomes Life

Posted on
The Sunday Post

American transplant surgeon Joshua Mezrich is a fun guy with a love of all things British. His disarming humour belies his gruelling work, creating life from loss. The 48-year-old, who is based at the University of Wisconsin, confesses to growing up on a diet of M*A*S*H and dinnertime tales from the ER, told by his engineer dad, who was training to become a doctor.

Appleton WWII vet turns 100

Posted on
WBAY

Noted: Cody Splitt of Appleton was one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Navy during the war and one of five women to receive a law degree from University of Wisconsin-Madison in her graduating class.

2019’s Best & Worst States to Have a Baby

Posted on
WalletHub

Quoted: “The biggest financial mistake prospective parents make is thinking they have to buy everything new. For large baby items associated with a particular life stage (e.g., bassinets, baby swings, exersaucers, etc.), parents can find good deals on secondary markets, such as online neighborhood buy-and-sell groups, consignment shops, or yard sales,” says Amber M. Epp, Associate Professor of Marketing, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The life of these products is much longer than the time period the baby will use it, so parents can buy many of these items in excellent used condition at a fraction of the price.”